It makes me absolutely insane when people come to me for advice or my opinion and when I provide it, they spend the rest of the conversation trying to convince me I’m wrong. I often find myself uttering in frustration, “Why did you ask for my opinion if you don’t like my answer?”
Maybe they don’t realize the answer they are seeking until after they’ve asked for advice and received it. Perhaps when the answer comes and it feels wrong, you suddenly know the right answer! It’s like settling a decision with a coin toss. If it’s “heads” you do one thing — if it’s “tails” you do another. There is a brief moment when that coin is flipping in the air and you instantly know how you want it to land.
I suppose advice works in the same way. We usually seek out people who will give us the answers we want so we can find validation. It’s a terrible form of rationalization to seek out like-minded individuals to tell you precisely what you want to hear.
I’m onto this whole scheme and I am able to recognize it so I’ve formulated a nearly perfect solution. When someone comes to me for my opinion, I ask a simple question:
“Do you want me to tell you what you want to hear or do you want me to tell you the truth?”
This one sentence is so powerful that it literally causes people to pause in contemplation. They almost always shift their eyes upward into their brain as if they are engaged in a genuine conversation with themselves pondering the answer to the question.
I have had people look at me with an honest epiphany and advise that they aren’t ready to hear the truth and instead opt for what they want to hear. This is always the path of least resistance because telling people what they want to hear is easy. Just parrot what they say and they walk away feeling as though you’re the smartest person in the world. Of-course it’s a fallacy because you aren’t really smart — you’re just appealing to the ego that is fueled by someone validating our beliefs and opinions.
The ones who opt for the truth after honest contemplation are the ones ready to receive it. Those are the people who listen with an open mind and prepare themselves to be challenged. This is where it gets real. We all have the ability to see everyone else’s problems and solutions so clearly. When I worked as a domestic violence detective, it was easy for me to look at a victim of abuse and tell them the relationship was harmful. When emotion is removed from a scenario, the answer is usually pretty clear. But rarely is emotion absent in our relationships and our life decisions.
That’s why we can sit in our own mess while being simultaneously capable of pointing out everything that is wrong in someone else’s life. Our own lives are blurry with emotion and we have to create and surround ourselves with a team of truth-tellers who will lovingly and gently sift through the grain and the chaff to expose the truth to us. It’s not easy but it’s necessary.
This post was originally published on March 25, 2017 on Chief Ziman’s blog.
